It’s a truism that governments lie during wartime. The mandate of a military is to attain its military objectives, not to accurately information its citizens.
It was in 2008, during the Israeli bombing of Gaza that killed more than a thousand civilians, that I first became aware of the Israeli government’s lies. When Israel bombed a UN school and claimed rockets were being fired from there, the UN publicly challenged them, saying they had told the Israelis there was no such activity in the building. Mainstream media largely blacked out this story, while more alternative sources covered it.
Today, the world is seeing the Israeli government’s lies playing out even in mainstream media. AP has asked the Israeli government for proof that there were military targets operating in their building and has so far received nothing. The IDF also told the press they were preparing a ground assault, which later proved to be false. The assertions of Israeli officials are now being questioned on the same networks that once uncritically repeated them.
One of the most destructive lies told about Gaza is the “human shields” narrative. We’re told that Hamas deliberately fires from populated areas to get their own people killed and thus make Israel look bad in the international press. This narrative at once serves to dehumanize Palestinians as people who hate Jews so much they willingly sacrifice their own children to kill them and at the same time to shift blame from Israel for the thousands of innocent civilians killed by its bombs.
Besides being specifically disproven false in countless individual cases (the UN school mentioned above and the bombing of Al-Shifa hospital and targeted killing of the Bakr boys in 2014 being examples), credible outside observers in Gaza, from UN agencies to rights groups to medical staff, have been unable to confirm this narrative. Yet we continue to hear it repeated as if it were proven fact.
When the 22-year-old volunteer medic was killed with a bullet to the back of the neck as she ran with her hands in the air surrounded by other uniformed medics, the IDF put out a video of her saying in an interview that she was a “human shield on the front lines of saving lives.” She was clearly using a metaphor for her role as in protecting shooting and teargas victims from death, but the IDF essentially tried to use this as ‘proof’ that her true role was to be killed by Israel so as to help delegitimize it. They even tried to claim that she was throwing molotov cocktails. All of this would be laughable if a beautiful person werent dead.
But we don’t even have to disprove to disqualify the “human shields” narrative as a justification for Israel’s mass killing. All we have to do is ask ourselves: if you know that bombing a target will kill innocent civilians and still bomb it, at what point are you engaged in conscious and willful killing? Given the extremely low casualty rate in Israel, does the killing of thousands constitute legitimate self-defense? And, when the other side is calling for a mutual ceasefire and refuse, can you still claim that they are the problem?
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ifesbob 